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Yelp Hipster Finder

yelp.com

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Re: Yelp Hipster Finder

#11

Post by encoderer »

captainbenises wrote: post #9

How does this work - is it rendered server side or client side? Very cool! Reminds me of the 2d historgrams and contour maps you can generate with R.

I have no idea how Yelp has implemented this but I've done Heatmaps before.

Basic process I built relied on caching map tiles.

Pre-compute your raw data by lat/long. Build that into map tiles you overlay on the map by determining map area and converting lat/long to pixels on the tile. Load new tiles as the map is panned. Do it quickly if you want users to be happy. Cache everything.

Re: Yelp Hipster Finder

#13

Post by czbond »

captainbenises wrote: post #10
captainbenises wrote: post #9

How does this work - is it rendered server side or client side? Very cool! Reminds me of the 2d historgrams and contour maps you can generate with R.

To reply to myself, it looks like it's rendered client side - the json just returns a bunch of points and the heatmap must be canvas. See the json here: http://s3-media3.ak.yelpcdn.com/wordmap/2/words/sf/dim-sum.j...

Yes - good client side JS to do this has only been around for a year or so. Before that it was ESRI, or map tile complexity...

Re: Yelp Hipster Finder

#14

Post by cb18 »

My initial thoughts were to comment, This is really freaking cool, great idea whoever. But when I realized I couldn't put my own keywords in the url and zoom the map out and move it around I was somewhat less impressed, it's still a neat idea though.

But, I think it would be 'really freaking cool' to do this while accessing the entire database of places and reviews with any keywords you want. I know that would require more development and server resources. It would probably be rather challenging to do this efficiently on the fly rather than using preprocessed data from a limited geographic range, I'm sure there is a yelp engineer or two that would like to take on the challenge though.

Re: Yelp Hipster Finder

#15

Post by Sealy »

That is a very cool feature. A great example of well applied Business Intelligence and data mining.

Hackers take note, this is how you get value out of your growing datasets.

Re: Yelp Hipster Finder

#17

Post by jmspring »

Surprisingly, the overlap between PBR and hipster isn't as great as I thought it would be. Though it is a bit closer in the east bay.

Pity it doesn't go down the peninsula.

Re: Yelp Hipster Finder

#18

Post by semiprivate »

This is actually a good way to figure out where to stay when visiting a city. Click tourist and avoid, click hipster and go there. Maybe go to the slightly less red areas for a more low key night. At least that's how you'd have fun if you were a 20-30 something in NYC.
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